AMD is dedicated to providing innovative and inexpensive ways to increase product performance...most people would say that the most significant innovation in AMD64 cores is the 64 bit instruction capabilities...but they are wrong
AMD has built the memory controller directly into the core rather than previous architecture that constructed it within the northbridge...this means that there is no longer a low frequency bus needed to connect the processor to the memory controller as they are intertwined and the FSB is effectively the speed of the core itself
This leads to direct access to the memory, known as Hypertransport or previously Lightning Data transfer...a high speed low latency bus that is capable of delivering up to 22GB/sec bandwidth...in the case of DDR400 memory the memory bandwidth is roughly 6.4GB/sec rather than the "standard" 3.2GB/sec that DDR400 would normally deliver if the memory controller was situated on the northbridge
Intel architecture still uses the traditional northbridge and FSB concept therefore the memory is still limited based on the communication required between numerous points...therefore AMD is able to utilize slower operating, cheaper memory modules to provide the same bandwidth as faster, more expensive modules that Intel uses
A processors clock frequency is no longer an accurate way of determining its power as a clock cycle simply refers to a single operation, however one operation is only as powerful as how many instructions it can perform. AMD architecture has allowed AMD to use slower clock speeds, however they perform more instructions per cycle therefore they compete competetively with faster clocked processors
An Athlon 3200+ really is 2GHz, but it performs roughly the same as an Intel pentium 4 processor operating at 3.2GHz...a dual core processor is a bit more complicated...that processor rating refers the Intel dual core processor that the AMD would compete competetively in multithreaded applications...therefore a 4800+ would perform roughly the same as a 4.8Ghz Pentium D